Weekend Movie Forecast: Harry Potter or 500 Days of Summer

Death in Love describes itself as a "provocative psychosexual tale set at the crossroads where family, history and sexuality collide." For the one guy out there still reading, it has something to do with "two brothers (Josh Lucas and Lukas Haas) who are trying to climb out of the shadows of their Holocaust survivor mother’s (Jacqueline Bissset) dark past – and the love affair she conducted with a Nazi doctor while in the camps." Stephen Holden at the Times wonders, "How do you explain a movie as hermetic and perverse and ultimately repugnant as Death in Love from a director who has enjoyed both critical recognition (Fresh, A Price Above Rubies) and commercial success (Remember the Titans)?

"Death in Love hasn’t a drop of humor or hope. Its dull, smudged look makes every environment appear joyless and claustrophobic... Death in Love burrows so deeply into the unconscious minds of its depressed New Yorkers that the movie seems to be mumbling to itself in a dream state, driven more by hazy Freudian logic than ordinary cause and effect. The words it murmurs are a litany of endless, futile self-recrimination."